New York Yankees

. Some believers and apostates question whether people can still have any faith after the Holocaust, and some .
. On account of the magnitude of the Holocaust, many theologians have re-examined the classical theological views on God's goodness and actions in the world. Coaches. While international human rights law moved forward quickly in the wake of the Holocaust, international criminal law has been slower to advance; after the Nuremberg trials and the Japanese war crime trials it was over forty years until the next such international criminal procedures, in 1993 in Yugoslavia. Manager. The Holocaust also galvanized the international community to take action against future genocide, including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.

Updated on January 27, 2006  . An ongoing effort to pursue Nazis and collaborators resulted, famously, in the trial of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. Jackson is affiliated with the Athletics, but wears a Yankee cap[7][8][9]). Other trials were conducted in the countries in which the defendants were citizens -- in West Germany and Austria, many Nazis were let off with light sentences, with the claim of "following orders" ruled a mitigating circumstance, and many returned to society soon afterwards. (Affiliation according to National Baseball Hall of Fame; R. In total, 5,025 Nazi criminals were convicted between 1945-1949 in the American, British and French zones of Germany. In 2003, the Office of Foreign Assets Control reported that the Yankees engaged in illegal trade with Cuba and had to settle with the United States government for US$75,000 [6]. Some of the higher ranking Nazi officials were tried as part of the Nuremberg Trials, presided over by an Allied court; the first international tribunal of its kind.

Against:. There were a number of legal efforts established to bring Nazis and their collaborators to justice. For:. By 1952, the Displaced Persons camps were closed, with over 80,000 Jewish DPs in the United States, about 136,000 in Israel, and another 20,000 in other nations, including Canada and South Africa. The following are arguments for and against these spending practices:. Former Jewish partisans in Europe, along with the Haganah in Palestine, organized a massive effort to smuggle Jews into Palestine, called Berihah, which eventually transported 250,000 Jews (both DPs and those who hid during the war) to the Mandate. It is a heated debate whether the Yankees' free-spending is positive or negative for baseball, and whether a strict salary cap would make the sport fairer and increase parity among the large-market and small-market teams. With the rise of Zionism, Palestine became the destination of choice for Jewish refugees, but local Arabs opposed the immigration, Britain refused to allow Jewish refugees into the Mandate, and many countries in the Soviet Bloc made any emigration illegal.

Frustrated after being outbid for pitcher Jose Contreras prior to the 2003 season, Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino even went so far as to dub the Yankees the "Evil Empire," a characterization that is primarily popular among Red Sox fans. Many Zionists, pointing to the fact that Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied lands had been turned away by other countries, argued that if a Jewish state had existed at the time, the Holocaust could not have occurred on the scale it did. As of 2005, the team payroll is more than $208 million, which is $85 million more than the second-highest team, the Red Sox, and more than the five lowest-payroll teams combined [4]. While Zionism had been prominent before the Holocaust, afterwards it became almost universally accepted among Jews. The current ownership spends more on player salaries than any other franchise in baseball. As a result, more than 250,000 languished in DP camps for years after the war ended. The Yankees are a notable team not only for their impressive history on the field, but also for their financial situation. The original plan of the Allies was to repatriate these "Displaced Persons" to their country of origin, but many refused to return, or were unable to as their homes or communities had been destroyed.

The Yankees are only the third franchise in sports history to draw over 4 million in regular season attendance at their own ballpark (the others being the 1993 Toronto Blue Jays with 4,057,947 and the 1993 Colorado Rockies with 4,483,350). The Holocaust and its aftermath left millions of refugees, including many Jews who had lost most or all of their family members and possessions, and often faced persistent anti-Semitism in their home countries. In September 2005, the club set a new American League home attendance record of 4,090,696. [34]^[35] The public advocacy of theories denying the Holocaust is a crime in some countries (including France, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany). Despite their most recent drought in World Series championships, the Yankees have continued to perform well in the regular season, recently winning their eighth straight AL East division title. In late 2005, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the Holocaust of European Jewry as a "myth". The tautology is part of the joke. Public Opinion Quarterly summarized that: "No reputable historian questions the reality of the Holocaust, and those promoting Holocaust denial are overwhelmingly anti-Semites and/or neo-Nazis," though Holocaust denial has also become popular in recent years among Islamic fundamentalists.

By analogy with the Curse of the Bambino, Mahnken points to the departure of utility player Clay Bellinger from the Yankee roster following the 2001 season and asserts that the Yankees will never again win the World Series until either they make amends to Bellinger or they win the championship anyway. In contrast, Holocaust deniers typically willfully misuse or ignore historical records in order to attempt to prove their conclusions, as Gordon McFee writes:. One particularly creative explanation jokingly proposed by blogger Larry Mahnken is the "Curse of Clay Bellinger". Historical revisionism is a well-accepted and mainstream part of the study of history; it is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information, or viewing known information from a new perspective. This argument is bolstered by the fact that the production of the Yankees' core players has decreased steadily since their 1996 World Series title. Most scholars contend that the latter term is misleading. Several sabermetricians have argued that success in the playoffs is largely the result of luck. Holocaust deniers almost always prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists.

Buster Olney, in his book The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, argues that George Steinbrenner's management style resulted in the players burning out psychologically. These views are not accepted as credible by historians, with organizations such as the American Historical Association, the largest society of historians in the United States, stating that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud.". These include depletion of the Yankee farm system because of trades and free agent acquisitions, the aging or departure of the players who had formed the core of the Yankees during the late 1990s, and allegedly poor coaching (like the overuse of Mariano Rivera in the 2001 World Series). Those who hold this position often further claim that Jews and/or Zionists know that the Holocaust never occurred, yet that they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to maintain the illusion of a Holocaust to further their political agenda. Many explanations have been given for the lack of Yankee World Series titles since 2000. Holocaust denial, also called Holocaust revisionism, is the belief that the Holocaust did not occur, or, more specifically: that far fewer than around six million Jews were killed by the Nazis (numbers below one million, most often around 300,000 are typically cited); that there never was a centrally-planned Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews; and/or that there were not mass killings at the extermination camps. On December 23, 2005, the Yankees stunned the baseball world by signing center fielder Johnny Damon from the rival Red Sox, where he was a marquee player. Most other historians have disagreed with Goldhagen's thesis, arguing that while anti-Semitism undeniably existed in Germany, Goldhagen's idea of a uniquely German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism is untenable, and that the extermination was unknown to many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus.

From the end of the 2005 World Series to December 2005, the baseball world noticed that the Yankees were patient with signing free agents. Another controversy was started by the sociologist Daniel Goldhagen, who argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep eliminationist German anti-Semitism. In the 2005-2006 offseason, general manager Brian Cashman took control of the Yankees, because owner George Steinbrenner and his advisors signed older talented players after the 2001 season. Recently, a synthesis of the two schools has emerged that has been championed by such diverse historians such as the Canadian historian Michael Marrus, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer and the British historian Ian Kershaw that contends that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust, but that he did not have a long-term plan and that much of the initiative for the Holocaust came from below in an effort to meet Hitler's perceived wishes. After the 2005 season, the Yankees needed to get younger and more athletic. Not until July 1941 did the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" come to mean extermination. In the 2005 Division Series, the Angels defeated the Yankees in five games in the first round of the postseason, winning the final game by a score of 5-3. Finally, Functionalist historians have made much of a memorandum written by Himmler in May, 1940 explicitly rejecting extermination of the entire Jewish people as "un-German" and going on to recommend to Hitler the "Madagascar Plan" as the preferred "territorial solution" to the "Jewish Question".

The Yankees seemed destined to win the division, and they did. The "Madagascar Plan" was cancelled because Germany could not defeat Britain and until the British blockade was broken, the "Madagascar Plan" could not be put into effect. Most of the season, the Yankees were chasing the Boston Red Sox for the division title. In 1940, the SS and the German Foreign Office had the so-called "Madagascar Plan" to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to a "reservation" on Madagascar. As the season went on, the Yankees got better and slugger Jason Giambi started to hit again. The reason why Frank vetoed the "Lublin Plan" was not due to any humane motives, but rather because he was opposed to the SS "dumping" Jews into the Government-General. Pavano and Wright struggled, so did Johnson. At first, the SS planned to create a gigantic "Jewish Reservation" in the Lublin, Poland area, but the so-called "Lublin Plan" was vetoed by Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland who refused to allow the SS to ship any more Jews to the Lublin area after November, 1939.

The 2005 season didn't start as it expected to be, once they were in last place in the American League East division. In particular, Functionalists have noted that in German documents from 1939 to 1941, the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was clearly meant to be a "territorial solution", that is the entire Jewish population was to be expelled somewhere far from Germany and not allowed to come back. The Yankees also acquired dominant lefty Randy Johnson from the Arizona Diamondbacks. The SS only ceased their support for German Zionist groups in May 1939 when Joachim von Ribbentrop informed Hitler of this, and Hitler ordered Himmler to cease and desist as the creation of Israel was not a goal Hitler thought worthy of German foreign policy. They signed pitchers Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright. Functionalists point to the SS's support for a time in the late 1930s for Zionist groups as the preferred solution to the "Jewish Question" as another sign that there was no masterplan for genocide. After the 2004 World Series, the Yankees needed to improve their pitching, which suffered in the huge collapse to the Red Sox. Adolf Eichmann was in charge of faciliating Jewish emigration by whatever means possible from 1937 on, until October 3, 1941 were German Jews forbidden to leave, when Reinhard Heydrich issued a order to that effect.

In the 2004 American League Championship Series against the Red Sox, the Yankees became the first team in professional baseball history, and only the third team in North American pro sports history (it happened in the NHL twice), to lose a best-of-7 series after taking a 3-0 series lead. Furthermore, Functionalists point to the fact that in the 1930s, Nazi policy aimed at trying to make life so unpleasant for German Jews that they would leave Germany. Other significant acquisitions during 2002 to 2004 included Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, and Javier Vázquez. In Mein Kampf Hitler repeatly states his inexorable hatred of the Jewish people, but no-where does he proclaim his intention to exterminate the Jewish people. The trend continued after the 2003 World Series, culminating when the Yankees traded for the "best player in baseball", Alex Rodriguez, in February 2004. They claim that what some see as extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature were mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete plans. The Yankees' quick ejection from the 2002 playoffs at the hands of the Anaheim Angels accelerated the changes, as ownership and management began to look increasingly on free agent acquisitions and major trades. Functionalists like Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Götz Aly, Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning hold that the Holocaust was started in 1941-1942 as a result of the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military losses in Russia.

The loss in the 2001 World Series effectively marked the end of the 1990s Yankee dynasty, as lynchpin players began to retire, not be re-signed, or traded. Mayer claimed Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December 1941. In 2003, the Yankees defeated their long-time rival the Boston Red Sox in a tough seven-game ALCS, which featured a near-brawl in Game 3 and a series-ending walk-off home run by Aaron Boone in the 11th inning of the final game, only to be defeated by the Florida Marlins - a team with a payroll a quarter of the size of the Yankees' - in the World Series, 4 games to 2. Yet another group of intentionalist historians such as the American Arno J. In addition, the usually potent Yankee attack turned ice-cold. More recent intentionalist historians like Eberhard Jäckel continue to emphasize the relative earliness of the decision to kill the Jews, although they are not willing to claim that Hitler planned the Holocaust from the beginning. Arizona manager Bob Brenly used his pitching staff, which included Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, very effectively. Other Intentionalists like Andreas Hillgruber, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand suggested that Hitler had decided upon the Holocaust sometime in the early 1920s.

But, the usually unhittable Mariano Rivera shockingly blew the lead - and World Series - to the Arizona Diamondbacks in the bottom of the 9th inning of Game 7. Later Dawidowicz was to date the decision for genocide back to November 11, 1918. In the emotional October 2001, following the September 11 attack on New York City's World Trade Center, the Yankees defeated the Oakland Athletics 3 games to 2 in the Division Series, and then the Seattle Mariners in the ALCS, 4 games to 1. Intentionalists like Lucy Dawidowicz argue that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning of his political career, at very least from 1919 on, if not earlier. However, their regular season record was surpassed by the 2001 Seattle Mariners, who went 116-46 before losing to the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. Functionalists stress that the Nazi anti-Semitic policy was constantly evolving in ever more radical directions and the end product was the Holocaust. The '98 Yankees went 11-2 during the playoffs and finished with a combined record of 125-50, a major league record. Functionalists see the Holocaust as coming from below in the ranks of the German bureaucracy with little or no involvement on the part of Hitler.

The 1998 Yankees are widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest teams in baseball history, having compiled a then-AL record of 114 regular season wins against just 48 losses en route to a World Series sweep of the Padres. Functionalists hold that Hitler was anti-Semitic, but that he did not have a masterplan for genocide. The Yankees are the most recent major league team to repeat as World Series champions. Intentionalists hold that the Holocaust was the result of a long-term masterplan on the part of Hitler's and that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust. In these four World Series victories, the Yankees won fourteen straight games. The terms were coined in a 1981 article by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason to describe two schools of thought about the origins of the Holocaust. In 2000, the Yankees met up with cross-town New York Mets for the first Subway Series since 1956 and won four games to one. A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of functionalism versus intentionalism.

In 1998 and 1999, they swept the San Diego Padres and Atlanta Braves, respectively. These results were confirmed in other experiments as well, such as the Stanford prison experiment. The 1998-2000 Yankees were the first team to "three-peat" with World Series victories since the Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s. Milgram's findings demonstrated that reasonable people, when instructed by a person in a position of authority, obeyed commands entailing what they believed to be the death or suffering of others. Other prominent members of the late 1990s championships teams acquired through trades included Paul O'Neill, David Cone, Tino Martinez, John Wetteland, Chuck Knoblauch, and Roger Clemens, while Jimmy Key, Wade Boggs, David Wells, Mike Stanton, and Orlando "El Duque" Hernández were signed as free agents. Stanley Milgram was one of a number of post-war psychologists and sociologists who tried to address why people obeyed immoral orders in the Holocaust. However, the foundation laid by Michael and Watson of players like Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams was a significant factor in the Yankees' return to prominence. Robert Gellately, a historian at Oxford University, conducted a widely-respected survey of the German media before and during the war, concluding that there was "substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans" in aspects of the Holocaust, and documenting that the sight of columns of slave laborers were common, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known^[32].

General manager Bob Watson was dismissed when the Yankees failed to repeat in 1997 and was replaced by Brian Cashman, a former Yankees intern. Recent historical work suggests that the majority of Germans knew that Jews were being indiscriminately killed and persecuted, even if they did not know of the specifics of the death camps. Initially derided as a retread choice ("Clueless Joe" ran the headline on one of the city's tabloid newspapers), Torre's smooth manner proved out as he led the Yankees to a World Series victory in 1996, defeating the Atlanta Braves in six games. Debate also continues on how much average Germans knew about the Holocaust. Showalter left after the 1995 season due to personality clashes with Steinbrenner and his staff and was replaced by Joe Torre. On May 12, 1943, Polish government-in-exile and Bund leader Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to protest the inaction of the world with regard to the Holocaust, stating in part in his suicide letter:. A year later, the team reached the playoffs as the wild card and was eliminated only after a memorable series against the Seattle Mariners. The US State Department was aware of the use and the location of the gas chambers of extermination camps, but refused pleas to bomb them out of operation.

The first significant sign of success came in 1994, when the Yankees had the best record in the AL when the season was cut short by the players' strike. By the end of 1942, however, the evidence of the Holocaust had become clear and on December 17, 1942 the Allies issued a statement that the Jews were being transported to Poland and killed. Under general managers Gene Michael and Bob Watson and manager Buck Showalter, the club shifted its emphasis from buying talent to developing talent through its farm system and then holding onto it. In the summer of 1942 a Jewish labor organization (the Bund) got word to London that 700,000 Polish Jews had already died, and the BBC took the story seriously, though the United States State Department did not take the news seriously^[31]. The bad judgment and bad luck of the '80s and early '90s started to change when, while owner Steinbrenner was under suspension, management was able to implement a coherent program without interference from above. By early 1941, the British had received information via an intercepted Chilean memo that Jews were being targeted, and by late 1941 they had intercepted information about a number of large massacres of Jews conducted by German police. To add to the oddity, the Yankees (and Hawkins) were no-hit by the White Sox 11 days later. Since the early years of the war the Polish government-in-exile published documents and organised meetings to spread word of the fate of the Jews.

The 4-0 loss (to the White Sox) was the largest margin of any no-hitter loss in the 20th century. However, numerous rumors and eyewitness accounts from escapees and others gave some indication that Jews were being killed in large numbers. In 1990, Yankee pitcher Andy Hawkins became the first Yankees pitcher ever to lose a no-hitter, when the third baseman (Mike Blowers) committed an error, followed by 2 walks and an error by the left fielder (Jim Leyritz) with the bases loaded, scoring all 3 runners as well as the batter. Some claim that the full extent of what was happening in German-controlled areas was not known until after the war. During the 1980s the Yankees, led by their All-Star first baseman Don Mattingly, had the most total wins out of any major league team, but failed to win a World Series (the first such decade since the 1910s). Arguments that no documentation links Hitler to "the Holocaust" ignore the records of his speeches kept by Nazi leaders such as Joseph Goebbels and rely on artificially limiting the Holocaust to exclude what we do have documentation on, such as the T-4 Euthanasia Program and the Kristallnacht pogrom. The Yankees entered the 1990s as a last-place team, having spent well but not always wisely on free-agent players since their last appearance in the World Series in 1981. Just five weeks later on February 22, Hitler was recorded saying "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jews" to his closest associates.

The Yankees won the day, driving a stake through the hearts of their rivals' fans when Bucky Dent drove a game-winning home run over the "Green Monster," one of several emotional moments in the team's history that had Red Sox fans wondering if their team was under some kind of a curse. To make for smoother intra-governmental cooperation in the implementation of this "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question", the Wannsee conference was held near Berlin on January 20, 1942, with the participation of fifteen senior officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, the records of which provide the best evidence of the central planning of the Holocaust. A playoff game between the two teams was held to decide who would go on to the pennant, with the game being held at Boston's Fenway Park (because the Red Sox had won more head-to-head games between the two teams that season). A mass of evidence suggests that sometime in the fall of 1941, Himmler and Hitler agreed in principle on the complete mass extermination of the Jews of Europe by gassing, with Hitler explicitly ordering the "annihilation of the Jews" in a speech on December 12, 1941 (see Final Solution). The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry came to a head in the 1978 season, when the two clubs finished the regular season in a tie for first place in the AL East. Hitler encouraged the killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in a speech in July, 1941, though he almost certainly approved the mass shootings earlier. The race for the pennant often came to a close competition between the Yankees and the Red Sox, and for fans of both clubs, a game between the two teams (whether in the regular season or post-season championship games) was cause for a rivalry that was often bitter and ruthless, with brawls frequently erupting between both players and fans from the two clubs. Hitler authorized the mass killing of those labelled by the Nazis as "undesirables" in the T-4 Euthanasia Program.

October") defined the period as much as Martin and Steinbrenner. (source: Max Jakobson Commission Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity). Jackson's three home runs in the sixth and final game of the 1977 World Series against three different Dodger pitchers (earning him the nickname "Mr. About 75% of Estonia's Jewish community, aware of the fate that otherwise awaited them, managed to escape to the Soviet Union; virtually all the remainder (between 950 and 1000 people) were killed by Einsatzgruppe A and local collaborators before the end of 1941. George Steinbrenner purchased the club for $10 million on January 3, 1973 from CBS, renovated Yankee Stadium, hired and fired Billy Martin a number of times, feuded with star outfielder Reggie Jackson, and presided over the resurgence of the Yankees in the late '70s. The Arajs Commando, a Latvian volunteer police unit, for example, killed 26,000 Latvian Jews and was responsible for assisting in the killing of 60,000 more Jews.^[30]. After that the team's fortunes improved somewhat, but they would not become serious contenders again until 1974. Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary military units with German Einsatzgruppen detachments participated in the extermination of the Jewish population in their countries, as well as assisting the Nazis elsewhere, such as deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto.

In 1966 the team finished last in the AL for the first time since 1912, and next-to-last the following year. Ukrainian auxiliaries participated in a number of killings of Jews, among them in Romanian concentration camps in Bogdanovka and in Latvia. By contrast, the CBS-owned teams never went to the World Series, and in the first year of the new ownership - 1965 - the Yankees finished in the second division for the first time in 40 years; the introduction of the major league amateur draft in 1965 also meant that the Yankees could no longer sign any player they wanted. German Einsatzgruppen, together with Ukrainian auxiliary units, killed 33,000 Kievan Jews in Babi Yar in September 1941. Topping and Webb had owned the Yankees for 20 years, missing the World Series only 5 times, and going 10-5 in the World Series. Ukrainian nationalists killed 4,000 Lviv Jews in July 1941, and an additional 2,000 in late July 1941 during the so-called Petliura Days pogrom. Jokesters at the time wondered if Walter Cronkite would become the manager, perhaps with Yogi Berra doing the newscasts. The Ustase also deported 7,000 more Jews to German extermination camps.^[29].

After the 1964 season, CBS purchased the Yankees from Topping and Webb for $11.2 million. The Croatian Ustaše regime killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs (estimates vary widely, but a minimum of 330,000-390,000 is generally accepted), over 20,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma, primarily in the Ustase's Jasenovac concentration camp near Zagreb. It was to be the last World Series appearance by the Yankees for 12 years. ^[28]. Despite a valiant performance by Mantle, including a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth of Game 3 off Cardinals' reliever Barney Schultz, the Yankees fell to the Cardinals in seven games. 70,000 Jews were forced on a death march to Austria—thousands were shot and thousands more died of starvation and exposure. Louis Cardinals in a Series immortalized by David Halberstam's book, October 1964. Moreover, 20,000 Budapest Jews were shot by the banks of the Danube by Hungarian forces.

The aging Yankees returned to the World Series in 1964 to face the St. At this late date in the war with German defeat appearing likely, Hungarian police nevertheless participated fully with SS in the roundups of 440,000 Jews for deportation to the extermination camps. Feeling burnt out after the season, Houk left the manager's chair to become the team's general manager and Berra, who himself had just retired from playing, was named the new manager of the Yankees. However Horthy resisted German demands for mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, and most survived until 1944, when the Horthy fell from power and was replaced by the Arrow Cross regime. This was the first time the Yankees were swept in a World Series. Hungarian army and police units killed several thousand Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad in January 1942. Behind World Series-MVP Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Johnny Podres, the Dodgers starting pitchers threw four complete games and combined to give up just four runs all Series. The Hungarian Horthy regime deported 20,000 Jews from annexed Transcarpathian Ukraine in 1941 to Kamianets-Podilskyi in the German-occupied Ukraine, where they were shot by the German Einsatzgruppen detachments.

The Yanks would again reach the Fall Classic in 1963, but were swept in four games by the Los Angeles Dodgers. Slovakia's Tiso regime deported approximately 70,000 Jews, of whom 65,000 were killed.^[27]. In 1962, the Yankees won their second consecutive World Series, defeating the San Francisco Giants in seven games. Norwegian police rounded up 750 Jews. Because of the excellence of Maris, Mantle, and World Series-MVP Ford, a fine pitching staff, stellar team defense, the team's amazing depth and power, and their overall dominance, the 1961 Yankees are universally considered to be one of the greatest teams in the history of baseball, compared often to their pinstriped-brethren, the 1927 Yankees, the 1939 Yankees, and the 1998 Yankees. A Dutch group, Henneicke Column, hunted and "delivered" 9,000 Jews for deportation^[26]. Maris won his second consecutive MVP Award while Whitey Ford captured the Cy Young. The Netherlands civilian administration and police participated in the roundups of 100,000 Jews.

The 1961 Yankees also clubbed a then-major league record for most home runs by a team with 240, a total not surpassed until the 1996 Baltimore Orioles hit 257 with the aid of the designated hitter. The Vichy French government and French police in Nazi-occupied France participated in the roundups of 75,000 Jews. The 109 regular season wins posted by the '61 club remain the third highest single-season total in franchise history, behind only the 1998 team's 114 regular season wins and 1927 team's 110 wins. Bulgaria, despite saving its own Jewish population, deported 11,000 Jews from occupied Greek and Yugoslavian territories. The Yankees won the pennant with a 109-53 record and went on to defeat the Cincinnati Reds in five games to win the 1961 World Series. Several small camps were built in Italy and the so-called Risiera di San Sabba hosted a crematorium; from 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in San Sabba, only a few of whom were Jews. Maris still holds the American League record.). The deported numbered about 8,369, and only about a thousand survived.

(McGwire's record was later broken by Barry Bonds, whose 73 home runs in 2001 remain the major league record. In Italy a law from 1938 restricted civil liberties of Jews, but after the fall of Mussolini and his creation of the Italian Social Republic, Jews started being deported to German camps. Some 30 years later, on September 4, 1991, an 8-member Committee for Historical Accuracy appointed by Major League Baseball did away with the dual records, giving Maris sole possession of the single-season home run record until it was broken by Mark McGwire on September 8, 1998. The Romanians also massacred Jews in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetka concentration camps. However, by decree of Commissioner Ford Frick, separate single-season home run records were maintained to reflect the fact that Ruth hit his 60 home runs during a 154-game season, while Maris hit his 61 in the first year of the new 162-game season. Nearly 100,000 Jews were killed in occupied Odessa and over 10,000 were killed in the Iasi pogrom. On October 1, 1961, on the final day of the season, Maris broke the record when he sent a pitch from Boston's Tracy Stallard into the right field stands at Yankee Stadium for his 61st home run. Some of the larger massacres included 54,000 Jews killed in Bogdanovka, a Romanian concentration camp along the Bug River in Transnistria, between 21 and 31 December 1941.

The duo's home run prowess led the media and fans to christen them 'The M & M Boys.' Ultimately, Mantle was forced to bow out in mid-September with 54 home runs when a severe hip infection forced him from the lineup. The exterminations committed in Iasi, Odessa, Bogdanovka, Domanovka, and Peciora, for example, were among the most hideous acts committed against Jews anywhere during the Holocaust."^[25]In cooperation with German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian auxiliaries, Romanians killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria. Throughout the summer, Mantle and reigning-MVP Roger Maris hit home runs at a record pace as both chased Babe Ruth's single season home run record of 60. released by the Romanian government concluded, "Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, Romania bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself. In the meantime, 1961 was one of the greatest years in Yankee history. An official report[24]. Once Finley purchased the Athletics, he immediately terminated the team's "special relationship" with the Yankees. The Romanian Antonescu regime was directly responsible for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews.

Many fans, and even other teams, frequently accused the Athletics of being operated as an effective farm team for the Yankees. Collaboration took the form of either rounding up of the local Jews for deportation to the German extermination camps or a direct participation in the killings. Maris had been acquired by the Yankees in one such trade. In addition to the direct involvement of Nazi forces, most European countries allied with or occupied by the Axis Powers collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. During Johnson's ownership, the Athletics traded many young players to the Yankees for cash and aging veterans. German police units also directly participated in the Holocaust, for example Reserve Police Battalion 101 in just over a year shot 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 more to the extermination camps.^[23]. Johnson was also a longtime business associate of then-Yankees owners Del Webb and Dan Topping. The Wehrmacht, or regular German army, participated less directly than the SS in the Holocaust (though it did directly massacre Jews in Russia, Serbia, and Greece), but it supported the Eisatzgruppen, helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, and used substantial slave labor.

He was the owner of Yankee Stadium at the time, but was forced to sell the stadium by American League owners as a condition of purchasing the Athletics. From the SS came the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp guards, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and many of the administrative offices behind the Holocaust. Johnson had acquired the then-Philadelphia Athletics from the family of Connie Mack in 1954. And, though there was no single military unit in charge of the Holocaust, the SS under Himmler was the closest. In December of 1960, Chicago insurance executive Charlie Finley purchased the Kansas City Athletics from the estate of Arnold Johnson, who had died that March. Many ministries, including those of armaments, interior, justice, railroads, and foreign affairs, had substantial roles in orchestrating the Holocaust; similarly, German physicians participated in medical experiments and the T-4 euthanasia program. During the 1960-61 offseason, a seemingly innocuous development may have marked the beginning of the end for this Yankees dynasty. A wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were involved in the Holocaust, from clerks and officials in the government to units of the army, the police, and the SS.

Stengel himself, who had reached his seventh decade in July of that year, clearly thought the issue was age discrimination, remarking, "I'll never make the mistake of turning 70 again." Yogi Berra's assessment of the loss was the equally famous comment, "We made too many wrong mistakes.". Since 1963, a commission headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice has been charged with the duty of awarding such people the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations. Stengel was blamed for the World Series loss for failing to start his ace, Ford, three times in the Series, and was replaced as manager with Ralph Houk prior to the 1961 season. Witold Pilecki, member of Armia Krajowa (the Polish Home Army), organized a resistance movement in the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread word of the Holocaust. It remains the only Game 7, walk-off home run in World Series history. There were also groups, like members of the Polish Zegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue Jews and other potential victims from the Nazis. However, the Yankees lost the 1960 World Series in heartbreaking fashion when Bill Mazeroski hit a game-winning, series-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 off Ralph Terry. Chiune Sugihara saved several thousands of Jews by issuing them with Japanese visas against the will of his Nazi-aligned government.

Led by Mantle, Ford, Berra, Elston Howard, and the newly acquired Roger Maris, the Yankees burst into the new decade seeking to replicate the remarkable success of the 1950s. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese diplomat Ho Fengshan and others saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes. For the decade, the Yankees won six World Series championships ('50, 51, '52, '53, '56, '58) and eight American League pennants. In a few cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as Oskar Schindler or Nicholas Winton, protected large numbers of Jews. Pitcher Bob Turley also won the Cy Young Award in 1958, the award's third year of existence. Similar individual and family acts of rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous cases of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers. Yankee players also dominated the American League MVP award, with a Yankee claiming ownership six times in the decade (1950 Rizzuto, 1951 Berra, 1954 Berra, 1955 Berra, 1956 Mantle, 1957 Mantle). Some towns and churches also helped hide Jews and protect others from the Holocaust, such as the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon which sheltered several thousand Jews.

The Yankees went on to win yet another World Series that season, and Larsen earned World Series MVP honors. In the second case, the Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Dobri Bozhilov, refused to deport its 50,000 Jewish citizens, saving them as well, though Bulgaria did deport Jews to concentration camps from areas in conquered Greece and Macedonia. Not only was it the only perfect game to be pitched in World Series play, it remains the only no-hitter of any kind to be pitched in postseason play. When the Jews returned home at war's end, they found their houses and possessions waiting for them, exactly as they left them. On October 8, 1956, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Dodgers, pitcher Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history. The King of Denmark and his subjects saved the lives of most of the 7,500 Danish Jews by spiriting them to safety in Sweden via fishing boats in October 1943. In 1956, Mantle won the major league triple crown, leading both leagues in batting average (.353), home runs (52), and RBIs (130). In two cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population.

The 1950s were also a decade of significant individual achievement for Yankee players. Also, Jewish volunteers from the Palestinian Mandate, most famously Hannah Szenes, parachuted into Europe in an attempt to organize resistance. Led by players like center fielder Mickey Mantle, pitcher Whitey Ford, and catcher Yogi Berra, Stengel's teams won 10 pennants and seven World Series titles in his twelve seasons as Yankee manager. There were a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in many countries (see Eugenio Calò for the story of a Jewish Italian partisan). The five consecutive championships won by the Yankees during this period remains the major league record. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after. Bettering the McCarthy-era clubs, Stengel's squad won the World Series in his first five years as manager, 1949 through 1953. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion.

As if on cue, new superstars began arriving, including the "Oklahoma Kid", Mickey Mantle, whose first year (1951) was DiMaggio's curtain call. On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (those prisoners kept separate from the main camp and involved in the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising. He was also hampered by bone spurs in his heel, which hastened the final docking of the "Yankee Clipper". The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp. It has often been reported that he said he wanted to retire before he became an "ordinary" player. This uprising was more successful; 11 SS guards were killed, and roughly 300 of the 600 inmates in the camp escaped, with about 50 surviving the war. By this time, the Great DiMaggio's career was winding down. In October 1943 another uprising took place at Sobibór extermination camp.

The post-season proved to be a bit easier, as the Yankees knocked off their cross-town Flatbush rivals 4 games to 1. Gassing operations were interrupted for a month. The 1949 season is another that has been written about poetically, as a Yankees team that was seen as "underdogs" came from behind to catch and surpass the powerful Red Sox on the last two days of the season, in a faceoff that could be said to be the real beginning of the modern intense rivalry between these teams. Many buildings were burnt to the ground, and seventy inmates escaped to freedom, but 1,500 were killed. His tenure would prove to the most successful in the Yankees' history up to that point. In August 1943 an uprising also took place at the Treblinka extermination camp. Casey had a reputation for being somewhat of a clown and had been associated with managing excruciatingly bad teams such as the mid-1930s Boston Braves, so his selection was met with no little skepticism. There were also major resistance efforts in three of the extermination camps.

Despite finishing only 3 games back of the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians in 1948, Harris was released, and the Yankees brought in Casey Stengel as their manager. There were also other Ghetto Uprisings, though none were successful against the German military. After a couple of interim managers had come and gone, Bucky Harris was brought in and the Yankees righted the ship again, winning the 1947 pennant and facing a much-tougher Dodgers team than their 1941 counterparts, in a Series that went seven games and was a harbinger of things to come for much of the next decade. The ZOB and smaller organizations held out against the Nazis for 27 days, before all were killed. The Yanks then went into a bit of a slump, and manager McCarthy was let go early in the 1946 season. The largest instance of organized Jewish resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, from April to May of 1943, as the final deportation from the Ghetto to the death camps was about to commence. Louis Cardinals during 1942 and 1943. There are, however, many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another.

The war-thinned ranks of the major leagues nonetheless found the Yanks in the post-season again, as they traded World Series wins with the St. Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi German state and its supporters, few Jews and other Holocaust victims were able to resist the killings. Two months and one day after the final game of the Yanks' 4 to 1 win, the Pearl Harbor attacks occurred, and many of the best ballplayers went off to World War II. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at the camp, but 10,000 died from disease or malnutrition within a few weeks of liberation. The Yankees made short work of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1941 Series. Concentration camps were also liberated by American and British forces, including Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15. Modern baseball historians regard it as unlikely that anyone will ever hit .400 again, barring a change to the way the game is played; and as virtually impossible that anyone will approach DiMaggio's 56-game streak, which is so far beyond second place (44) as to be almost a statistical anomaly. In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, the prisoners had already been transported by death marches, leaving only a few thousand prisoners alive.

A crucial factor in ending the streak was the fielding of Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner, who stopped two balls that DiMaggio hit hard to the left. In July, 1944, the first major Nazi camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, who eventually liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. The streak was finally snapped in a game at Cleveland Stadium the next night before a huge crowd at the lakefront. Around 15,000 died on the way. A popular song by Les Brown celebrated this event, as Betty Bonney and the band members sang it: "He tied the mark at 44 / July the First, you know / Since then he's hit a good 12 more / Joltin' Joe DiMaggio / Joe, Joe DiMaggio, we want you on our side." The last game of the streak came on July 16 at Cleveland's League Park. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at the death camp at Auschwitz, the Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, thirty-five miles away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Meanwhile, DiMaggio, who had once hit in 61 straight games as a minor leaguer with the San Francisco Seals, began a hitting streak on May 15 which stretched to an astonishing 56 games. The largest and best known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland.

Ted Williams of the Red Sox was in the hunt for the elusive .400 batting average, which he achieved on the last day of the season. Prisoners who lagged behind or fell were shot. After an off season came the Summer of 1941, a much-celebrated year, often described by sportswriters as the last great year of the "Golden Era", before World War II and other realities intervened. The Nazis marched prisoners, already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. They also swept the Chicago Cubs in 1938, and the Cincinnati Reds in 1939. As the armies of the Allies closed in on the Reich at the end of 1944, the Germans decided to abandon the extermination camps, moving or destroying evidence of the atrocities they had committed there. They took the Giants 4 games to 2 in that Series, and 4 games to 1 the next year. Gold teeth were extracted from the corpses, and women's hair (shaved from the heads of victims before they entered the gas chambers) was recycled for use in products such as rugs and socks.

During Game 2 of the 1936 Series, they pounded the Giants 18-4, still the World Series record (through 2005) for most runs by a team in one game. The Nazis also forced some prisoners to work in the collection and disposal of corpses, and to mutilate them when required. When the Yankees did get into the Series, they had little trouble. Upon arrival in these camps, prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for work were immediately executed in gas chambers (which were sometimes disguised as showers) and their bodies burned, while others were first used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located in the camp or nearby. The strongest competition for the Yankees during that stretch was the Detroit Tigers, who won two pennants before that Yankees four-year stretch, and one after. At the peak of operations, Birkenau's gas chambers killed approximately eight thousand a day. They did it without Gehrig for most of 1939, as the superstar's retirement due to ALS saddened the baseball world. This camp was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1,000,000 Jews (including about 438,000 Jews from Hungary in the course of a few months), 75,000 Poles and gay men, and some 19,000 Roma.

Behind the thundering Yankees bats of DiMaggio, Gehrig and Frank Crosetti, and a superb pitching staff led by Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez and anchored by catcher Bill Dickey, the Yankees reeled off an unprecedented four consecutive World Series wins during 1936-1939. the latter possessing four gas chambers and crematoria. The young center fielder from San Francisco was an immediate impact player, batting .323, hitting 29 homers and driving in 125 runs in his rookie season of 1936. The largest death camp built was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had both a labor camp (Auschwitz) and an extermination camp (Birkenau);. Just as Gehrig stepped out of Ruth's considerable shadow, a new titan appeared on the horizon, in the person of Joe DiMaggio. More than 1.7 million Jews were killed at the three Aktion Reinhard camps by October 1943. The Yankees run during the 1930s could also be facetiously called the "McCarthy era", as manager Joe McCarthy (no relation to the infamous Senator of the same name) would guide the Yankees to new heights. In 1942, the Nazis began this most destructive phase of the Holocaust, with Aktion Reinhard, opening the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Babe Ruth hit his famous "Called Shot" home run in Wrigley Field in Game 3 of that Series, a fitting "Swan Song" to his illustrious post-season career. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except at Sobibór where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered. After three also-ran seasons, the Yankees returned to the American League top perch under new manager Joe McCarthy in 1932 and swept the Chicago Cubs in the World Series, running their streak of consecutive World Series game wins to 12, a mark which would stand until the 2000 Yankees bested it in the World Series that year. The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas, usually in "gas chambers", although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. Babe Ruth hit .625 with 3 home runs in that series, while Lou Gehrig hit .545 and belted 4 round-trippers. Over three million Jews would die in these extermination camps. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. In December, 1941, the Nazis opened Celmno, the first of what would soon be seven extermination camps, dedicated entirely to mass extermination on an industrial scale, as opposed to the labor or concentration camps.

The Yankees would repeat as American League champions in 1928, fighting off the resurgent Philadelphia Athletics, and sweep the St. By the end of 1943, another 900,000 Jews would be killed in this manner, but the pace was not fast enough for the Nazi leadership, who, at the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, began the implementation of the Final Solution, the complete extermination of the Jews of Europe. Ruth's home run total of 60 in 1927 set a single-season record which would stand for 34 years, and first baseman Lou Gehrig had his first big season with 47 round-trippers. These, and similar slaughters throughout Europe, killed around 100,000 Jews per month for five months. The 1927 team was so potent that it became known as "Murderers' Row" and is sometimes considered to have been the best team in the history of baseball (though similar claims have been made for other Yankee squads, notably those of 1939, 1961 and 1998). From September to the end of 1942, a series of mass killings took place throughout Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Latvia: over 33,000 Jews were killed at Babi Yar, 25,000 at Rumbula, over 36,000 at Odessa by Romanian forces, 9,000 at the Ninth Fort, and 40,000 (up to 100,000 by 1944) at Paneriai. Stengel would later become a "giant" for the Yankees as a manager. By the summer of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen turned to targeting Jews, starting with the extemination of 2,200 Jews in Bialystock on June 21, 1941, and quickly increased in scale.

Giants outfielder Casey Stengel, who even then was being called "Old Case", hit two homers to win the two games the Giants came away with. Poles were an early target in the AB Action, in which 30,000 Polish intellectual and political figures were rounded up, and 7,000 eventually killed. In 1921 through 1923 they faced the Giants in the World Series, losing the first two match-ups but turning the tables in 1923 after the Big Stadium opened. During the invasion of the Soviet Union, over 3,000 special killing units (Einsatzgruppen) followed the Wehrmacht, conducting mass killings of Poles, Communist officials, and the Jewish population that lived in Soviet territory. From 1921 to 1928, the Yankees went through their first period of great success, winning six American League pennants and three World Series. As many as 1.6 million Jews were killed in open-air shootings by Nazis and their collaborators, especially in 1941 before the establishment of the concentration camps. It was truly "the House that Ruth Built",. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, but in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either slaughtered or sent to the extermination camps.

The Stadium was the first triple-deck venue in baseball and seated an astounding 58,000. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated. The site for the stadium was chosen because the IRT Jerome Avenue subway line, now the MTA's#4 train, went right by there, practically on top of Yankee Stadium's right-field wall. On July 22, 1942, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the next 52 days (until September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp from Warsaw alone. and River Avenue in the Bronx. On July 19, 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the death camps. In 1923 the Yankees moved into Yankee Stadium at 161st St. From 1940 through 1942, disease (especially typhoid) and starvation killed hundreds of thousands of Jews confined in the ghettos.

The construction crew moved with remarkable speed and finished the big new ballpark in less than a year. The ghettos were established throughout 1940 and 1941, and were immediately turned into immensely crowded prisons; though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of the population of Warsaw, it occupied only about 2.4% of city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. Instead, to McGraw's chagrin, they broke ground for a new ballpark just across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000, but ghettos were instituted in many cities (list). At that time, John McGraw was said to have commented that the Yankees should "move to some out-of-the-way place, like Queens". After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis created ghettos to which Jews (and some Roma) were confined, until they were eventually shipped to death camps and killed. In 1921 the Yankees were told to move out of the Polo Grounds after the 1922 season. Between 1939 and 1941, over 200,000 people were killed.

The home run hitting exploits of Ruth proved popular with the public, to the extent that the Yankees were soon outdrawing their landlords, the Giants. The T-4 Euthanasia Program was established to "maintain the genetic purity" of the German population by systematically killing citizens who were physically deformed, disabled, handicapped, or suffering from mental illness. He was especially noted for development of the Yankees' farm system. A number of deadly pogroms by local, non-German populations occurred during the Second World War, some with German encouragement, and some spontaneously, such as the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941 in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police and the Jedwabne pogrom in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by their Polish neighbors. Barrow would act as general manager or president of the Yankees for the next 25 years and may deserve the bulk of the credit for the team's success during that period. Similar events took place in Vienna at the same time. Barrow came on board after the 1920 season, and like many of the new Yankee players had previously been a part of the Red Sox organization, having managed the team since 1918. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,574 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed.

Huggins was hired in 1919 by Ruppert while Huston was serving in Europe with the army (this would lead to a break between the two owners, with Ruppert eventually buying Huston out in 1923). Many scholars date the beginning of the Holocaust itself to the anti-Jewish riots of the Night of Broken Glass ("Kristallnacht") of November 9, 1938, in which Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Other critical newcomers in this period were manager Miller Huggins and general manager Ed Barrow. Concentration camps also existed in Germany itself, and while not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were executed. Harry Frazee finally found success on Broadway in 1927 with the musical comedy No No Nanette, which included the song "Tea For Two". The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before they reached their destination. The Red Sox did not win a World Series from 1919 until 2004 (see Curse of the Bambino), often finding themselves out of the World Series hunt as a result of the success of the Yankees. Most of the camps were located in the area of General Government in Poland, but there were camps in every country occupied by the Nazis.

Two of the four Boston newspapers agreed with the deal at the time. During the War, concentration camps for Jews and other "undesirables" were spread throughout Europe, with new camps being created near centers of dense "undesirable" populations, often focusing on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma populations. That would continue during his Yankees years, but the ownership was more tolerant, provided he brought fans and championships to the ballpark. After 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, the concentration camps increasingly became places where the enemies of the Nazis, including Jews and POWs, were either killed or forced to act as slave laborers, and kept undernourished and tortured. Ruth was also regarded as a problem, a carouser. These early concentration camps were eventually consolidated into centrally run camps, and by 1939, six large concentration camps had been established. Frazee also wished to aid the Yankees, as giving the Yankees a box office draw would strengthen a legal ally, and reduce the pressure he faced[3]. Starting in 1933, the Nazis set up concentration camps within Germany, many of which were established by local authorities, to hold political prisoners and "undesirables".

Frazee traded Ruth in January of 1920, citing Ruth's demand for a raise after being paid the highest salary in baseball, and despite owning the single season homerun record at the time of the trade (hitting 29 homeruns in 1919[2]). Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the Web, are listed in Holocaust (resources). However, pitcher-turned-outfielder Babe Ruth was the biggest of them all. Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims Names is searchable over the Internet at yadvashem.org or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in Israel. From 1919 to 1922, the Yankees acquired pitchers Waite Hoyt, Carl Mays and Herb Pennock, catcher Wally Schang, shortstop Everett Scott and third baseman Joe Dugan, all from the Red Sox. Yad Vashem provides a searchable database of three million names, about half of the known direct Jewish victims. President Ban Johnson, Frazee faced most of the legal battles which proved costly[1]. More recently, however, there has a been a resurgence of interest by descendants of Holocaust survivors in researching the fates of their lost relatives.

Further, as Frazee owned the strongest of the "Insurrectos" franchizes, which antagonized A.L. These efforts became much less intense as the years went by. Many of the newly acquired players who would later contribute to their success came from the Boston Red Sox, whose owner, theater impresario Harry Frazee, had bought his team on credit and needed money to pay off his loans and purchase Fenway Park from the Fenway Park Trust. Initially after World War II, there were millions of members of families broken up by the war or the Holocaust searching for some record of the fate and/or whereabouts of their missing friends and relatives. Over the next few years the new owners would begin to enlarge the payroll. The summary of various sources' estimates on the number of Nazi regime victims is given in Matthew White's online atlas of 20th century history. The Yankees detente with the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox circa 1920 (all three collectively known as the "Insurrectos") paid off well. Additionally, the Nazis' allies, the Ustaša regime in Croatia conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the Serbs in the areas which it controlled, resulting in the deaths of at least 330,000–390,000 Serbs.

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the Yankees dominance comes from its roots. The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as was the case for the groups above. Ruppert later said, "For $450,000 we got an orphan ball club, without a home of its own, without players of outstanding ability, without prestige." But now with an owner possessing deep pockets, and a willingness to dig into them to produce a winning team. Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in their Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990).^[22]. Congressman for eight years. One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Ruppert was heir to the Ruppert brewery fortune and had also been tied to the Tammany Hall machine, serving as a U.S. Her listing of deaths by country is available in the article about her book, The War Against the Jews.^[21].

At the start of 1915, they sold the team to Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Captain Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many records were destroyed during the war. By the mid 1910s, owners Farrell and Devery had become estranged and both were in need of money. Using official census counts may cause an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Before very long, New York Yankees had become the official nickname of the club. Lucy Davidowicz used prewar census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died. With the change of parks in 1913, the "Highlanders" reference became obsolete, and the de facto team nickname became exclusively "Yankees". Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000."^[18] } Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.^[19] British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.^[20].

The name grew in popularity over the team's first decade. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation;" 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings;" and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. The New York Herald, on April 15, 1906, reported "Yankees win opening game from Boston, 2-1". Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. That matter-of-fact wording suggests the nickname was already well-known. The estimates:. During the early 1900s, the nickname "Yankees" was occasionally applied to the club, as a variant on "Americans", verifiably as early as June 21, 1904, when Patsy Dougherty was traded from Boston to New York, and the Boston Herald's report was headlined "Dougherty as a Yankee". However, the following estimates are considered to be highly reliable.

Relations between the clubs had warmed when the Giants were allowed to lease Hilltop Park while the Polo Grounds was being rebuilt in 1911 following a disastrous fire. Recently declassified British and Soviet documents have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed^[15]. From 1913 to 1922 the team would play in the Polo Grounds, a park owned by their National League rivals, the Giants. The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime will never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon common range of the number of victims. For fans of the team formally named the Red Sox in 1908, the 1904 season-ender would prove to be the last time Boston would defeat the Yankees in a pennant-deciding game for literally a century. There had earlier been attempts at sterilizing them using X-rays. 1904 was the last year a Series was not played, until the strike-truncated year of 1994. About 100,000 communists were killed.

Brush, who then led a committee that formalized the rules governing the World Series. ^[14] However, Japan was part of the Axis Pact with Germany, and no Japanese were known to be deliberately imprisoned or killed. The resulting tongue-lashing of the Giants by the media stung their owner, John T. Black and Asian residents in Germany, and black prisoners of war, were also victims; often being singled out in internment camps. Although Boston had won the pennant, the Giants still refused to participate. People with disabilities were among the first to be killed, and the United States Holocaust Memorial museum notes that the T-4 Program became the "model" for future exterminations by the Nazi regime.^[13] The T-4 Euthanasia Program was established in 1939 in order to maintain the "purity" of the so-called Aryan race by systematically killing children and adults born with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness. First, the presence of the Highlanders in the race had led the Giants to announce they would not participate in the World Series against a "minor league" team. Around 400,000 individuals were sterilized against their will for having mental deficiencies or illnesses deemed to be hereditary in nature.

This event had historical significance in several ways. The Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed to be cared for by others, but first and foremost, the mentally and physically handicapped were considered an affront to Nazi notions of a society peopled by a perfect, superhuman Aryan race. New York pitcher Jack Chesbro threw a wild pitch in the ninth inning which allowed the eventual pennant-winning run to score for the Boston Americans. Several hundred thousand mentally and physically disabled people also were exterminated. Their best chance came on the last day of the 1904 season, at the Hilltop. They refused involvement in politics, would not say "Heil Hitler", and did not serve in the German army. Their somewhat tainted ownership, along with the questionable activities of some players, notably first baseman Hal Chase, raised suspicions of game-fixing, but little of that was ever proven. Around 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses perished in concentration camps, where they were held for political and ideological reasons.

As the Highlanders, the team enjoyed success only twice, finishing in second place in 1904 and 1910; but otherwise, much of their first fifteen years in New York was spent in the cellar. The Nazis also targeted some religious groups. Today the site of the original Hilltop Park is occupied by buildings of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. They were labeled "anti-social," but were rarely sent to camps for the engaging in homosexuality. The name was also a reference to the noted British military unit The Gordon Highlanders, as the team president from 1903 to 1906 was named Joseph Gordon. Lesbians were not normally treated as harshly as gay men. Consequently the field was known as Hilltop Park and the team quickly became known as the New York Highlanders. According to Heinz Heger, in the concentration camps gay men "suffered a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners."^[12].

and Broadway in Manhattan, near the highest point on the island. Some gay men were also used in medical experiments. The franchise's first park in New York was located at 165th St. The deaths of at least an estimated 15,000 gay men in concentration camps were officially documented, but it is difficult to put an exact number on just how many gay men perished in death camps. Farrell owned a casino and several pool halls, while Devery had served as a blatantly corrupt chief of the New York City police and had only been forced out of the department at the start of 1902. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order. Farrell and Devery both had deep ties into city politics and gambling. An additional unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals.

The AL's Baltimore franchise became the New York franchise when its new owners, Frank Farrell and William Devery, were able to find a ballpark location not blocked by the Giants. More than one million gay German men were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were serving prison terms as convicted gay men. The NL also agreed that the "junior circuit" could establish a franchise in New York. By 1936, however, homosexual members of the party had been purged and Heinrich Himmler led an effort to persecute gays under existing and new anti-gay laws. In January 1903, the American and National Leagues held a "peace conference" to settle conflicts over player contract disputes and to agree on future cooperation. Initially homosexuality was discreetly tolerated while officially shunned, and the early Nazi leadership included a number of known homosexuals. A week later the owner of the Giants also gained controlling interest of the Orioles and raided the team for players, after which the league declared the team forfeit and took control, still intending to move the franchise to New York when and if possible. Gay (homosexual) men were also targets of the Holocaust, as homosexuality was deemed incompatible with Nazism because of their failure to reproduce the "master race." This was combined with homophobia and the belief among the Nazis that homosexuality could be contagious.

As a result of a feud with league president Ban Johnson, who rigidly enforced rules about rowdyism on the field of play, McGraw jumped leagues to manage the New York Giants in the middle of the 1902 season. Between a quarter and a half of the Romani population was killed, upwards of 220,000 people.^[11] In Eastern Europe, Roma were deported to the Jewish ghettoes, shot by SS Einsatzgruppen in their villages, and deported and gassed in Auschwitz and Treblinka. When the team began play as the Baltimore Orioles in 1901, they were managed by John McGraw. Although, despite discriminatory measures, some Romani groups, including some of the Sinti and Lalleri of Germany, were spared deportation and death, the remaining Romani groups suffered much like the Jews. The intention of Johnson and the American League had been to place a team in New York City, but their efforts had been stymied by the political connections that owners of the National League New York Giants had with Tammany Hall. Hitler's campaign of genocide against the Romani population of Europe involved a particularly bizarre application of Nazi "racial hygiene". Previously a minor league (known as the Western League until 1899), the American League carried over five of its previous locations and added three more on the East Coast, including one in Baltimore, Maryland, which had lost its National League team when that league contracted the year before. Proportional to their population, the death toll of Romanies (Roma, Sinti, and Manush) in the Holocaust was the worst of any group of victims.

At the end of the 1900 season the American League re-organized and, with its president Ban Johnson as the driving force, decided to assert itself as a new major league. The Slavs of Croatia and Slovakia were allies of Nazi Germany, and participated as collaborators in the Holocaust. . At the same time, not all Slavs were targeted by the Nazis. The Yankees are also the only team that is represented at every position in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Bodan Wytwycky estimated that as many as one quarter of all Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies were racially motivated, or 3 million Ukrainian deaths and 1.5 Belarusan deaths.^[10]. Among the North American major sports, the Yankees' success is only approached by the 23 Stanley Cup championships of the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey League. Thousands of Soviet peasant villages were annihilated by German troops for more or less the same reason.

Louis Cardinals and the Oakland Athletics are tied for second with 9 World Series victories each, and the Los Angeles Dodgers is second in World Series appearances with 18. During Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Red Army prisoners of war were arbitrarily executed in the field by the invading German armies (in particular by the notorious Waffen SS), died under inhuman conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps, or were shipped to extermination camps for execution simply because they were of Slavic extraction. The Yankees have won 26 World Series in 39 appearances; the St. The Nazi occupation of Poland (General Government, Reichsgau Wartheland) was one of the most brutal episodes of World War Two, resulting in over six million Polish deaths (over twenty percent of the country's inhabitants), including the extermination of three million Polish Jews, many in extermination camps like Auschwitz. They are one of two major league franchises which operate in New York City, the other being the New York Mets of the National League. The intelligentsia and socially prominent or influential people were primarily targeted, although there were some mass murders committed against the general population, as well as against other groups of Slavs. One of the American League's eight charter franchises, the Yankees have been among the most storied teams in North America over their 100+ year history; along with franchises like the Boston Celtics, Dallas Cowboys, and Montreal Canadiens, the Yankees have helped exemplify the phrase "dynasty" in professional athletics. Poles were one of the first targets of extermination by Hitler, as outlined in the speech he gave the Wehrmacht commanders before the invasion of Poland in 1939.

They are in the Eastern Division of the American League. Some Jews outside Europe under Nazi occupation were also affected by the Holocaust. The New York Yankees are a Major League Baseball team based in The Bronx, New York City, New York. Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia lost around half of their Jewish population, the Soviet Union over one third of its Jews, and even countries such as France and Italy had each seen around a quarter of their Jewish population killed. ♦ - Hall of Famer
Jackie Robinson's #42 is retired by Major League Baseball. Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population destroyed. (Also referred to as "Americans" 1903-1909 and "Yankees" 1910-1912). Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in the world before the war, had had over 90% of its Jewish population, or about 3,000,000 Jews, killed.

Because New York won the regular season series with Boston, New York was awarded the division championship and Boston was awarded the wild card.. By the end of the war, much of the Jewish population of Europe had been killed in the Holocaust. No official titles were awarded in 1994.
[3] - In 2005, the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox finished the season with identical records of 95-67 and finished tied for first place in the East Division standings. Even as the Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps. New York was in first place in the East Division by six and a half games when play was stopped. Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal—the extermination of the Jews.^[9]. The Yankees had the third best record in the division when considering the entire season, two games behind Milwaukee and Baltimore.
[2] - In 1994, a players' strike wiped out the last eight weeks of the season and all post-season. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibór and Treblinka II.

New York had the best record in the East Division when play was stopped and was declared the first-half division winner. Josef Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. [1] - In 1981, a players' strike in the middle of the season forced the season to be split into two halves. Dr. Rookie: GCL Yankees, Gulf Coast League. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Short A: Staten Island Yankees, New York-Penn League. As the war started, large massacres of Jews took place, and, by December 1941, Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews.